Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of the truth.

Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of the truth.

This week, VICE’s 2016 Fiction Issue is out, with work from exciting voices like Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, Roxane Gay, and more. This year’s fiction issue, like the magazine itself, is an engaging, diverse, and sometimes in-your-face read with topics ranging from smart cars to campus rape, love triangles to the meaning of life.

Revisiting a story gives us an opportunity to explore universal experiences from the perspective of those who weren’t represented in the original, and nowhere is this more apparent than in today’s generation of young writers and artists bringing overt queerness into the literary canon.

Kathleen Hanna sat down with VICE’s Kim Taylor Bennett and immediately began a very honest and powerful discussion of her experience with tokenism, how we won’t live in a post-sexist world until the rape crisis hotline stops ringing off the hook and women’s shelter rooms aren’t packed, and the incredibly difficult work of unpacking the damage perpetrated by abuse.

Over at VICE, Lauren Oyler interviews Mark Greif, author of the recently released Against Everything. Greif trains his keen thinking on current culture, from the almost paradoxical way sanctimony and change seem to go hand in hand of late, to the unnerving fact that loneliness itself may have recently been altered:

Heads up, Harry Potter fans: the staff over at VICE confirm that J.K. Rowling will be coming out with three more short stories about Hogwarts. The stories will provide background to some of the secondary characters in the Harry Potter series:

In its infinite wisdom, VICE has produced a show for the company’s TV channel, VICELAND, where Action Bronson and his friends smoke themselves into oblivion while they try to grapple with the immensity of history and the cosmos as communicated by cheeseball history documentaries.

Over at VICE, Lincoln Michel nabbed the elusive and brilliant Joy Williams for an interview about her newest short story collection, ninety-nine stories of God. Her answers are wonderful in their minimalist nature, and for lovers of lists she even included “8 Essential Attributes of the Short Story (and one way it differs from a novel).”

Digital media companies are suddenly worried about declining ad revenue, and the venture capitalists funding these companies have also turned off the faucet of cash as they realize that success stories like BuzzFeed and Mashable are not the unicorns everyone thought they were.

For VICE, Amelia Dimoldenberg asks people in London why they visit their local libraries. Since 2010, UK has lost nearly 350 libraries because of cuts in local spending. But the answers Dimoldenberg receives show how necessary libraries still are:

“The library is a great part of the community, especially for young people who find it hard to study at home.

Preserving information and data archives in the digital age presents a new kind of challenge. Physical books may degrade over time, but even a book in poor condition can be taken down off a shelf and read. Digital storage devices, however, require functional systems to access any of the data.

For Motherboard at VICE, Joseph Cox interviews the two creators of The Torist, the first literary journal created and available solely on the dark web. Robert W. Gehl, the public liaison for the journal, noted that creating a journal on the dark web was meant “to swim against the current popular conceptions of anonymity and encryption.”

The first books of 2016 are rolling off the presses this week, and among them is Samantha Hunt’s third novel, Mr. Splitfoot, which is already earning buzz for its prize-winning potential. It’s a modern gothic ghost story involving meteor craters, conmen, twins who channel spirits, a mysterious aunt who doesn’t speak, and a pregnant woman who follows said aunt in an on-foot odyssey across New York state toward some unknown end.

2016 is the 400th year since Shakespeare’s death and, to celebrate the famed playwright, Hogarth Press will release versions of Shakespeare’s works reimagined by popular authors for the modern audience. At VICE, Hope Whitmore interviews author Jeanette Winterson, who will be reworking Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale:

For Motherboard at VICE, Elizabeth Preston profiles the work of Sarah Harmon, a programmer in the field of computational creativity. Harmon has taken significant steps in designing programs that can learn the rules of language and literature to create their own attempts at figurative language and poetry.

[Soccer] games on the radio are absolutely like literature—the metaphors, the pacing, the need for an evolving style. You can’t always say the same thing. The role of the play-by-play announcer seems much more interesting to me than that of the color commentator.

Over at Vice, Julian Morgans gets a hold of Tim Jacobus, the guy behind R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series’ book covers. Their conversation touches on prog rock, horror’s allure, and the literary merit of the little horror novels:

PEN America generated quite a controversy when it decided to honor French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo. Six authors called for a boycott of the gala and circulated a petition slamming the organization. Other authors, like Salman Rushdie, criticized the critics.

Hello

Welcome to The Rumpus! We’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, fiction, and poetry—along with kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We want to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny).